


A dream now a memory

by FranTastic



Series: Aftermath of the AU [1]
Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Angst, Child Loss, Coma, Grief/Mourning, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, The author's AU, magical stasis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-28
Updated: 2015-05-28
Packaged: 2018-04-01 17:09:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,656
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4028032
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FranTastic/pseuds/FranTastic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Belle remembers baby Neal</p><p>It still bothers me that Belle and Rumple have these memories of a child, but the writers have confirmed that it was their intention that the baby be Neal.  This is just my imagining of what Belle went through once she got back to Storybrooke.<br/>This is quite angsty, but at least Archie is around to help some.</p><p>Trigger warnings for child loss, PTSD and severe grief.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A dream now a memory

**Author's Note:**

> "In case you ever foolishly forget; I am never not thinking of you." -Virginia Woolf

There were times when her arms would ache with longing.

Belle French Gold had to accept that her memories from the author’s story were not real. Intellectually she knew the truth. It just didn’t seem to matter to her heart.

There were times where she woke up expecting her breasts to be swollen with milk. But even if her heart and mind had trouble with the truth, her body remembered correctly. Her stomach was flat as if she had never been pregnant. Because of course, she hadn’t been. Not really.

She often found herself longing to be the person that she was before. The new memories made her heart ache, and she wished she could go back to being the carefree person from even three months ago. Thinking her biggest problem would be what she would do if her estranged husband came back to town. How they would work themselves back together. Belle found herself wanting to shake the former version of herself, so many things in life were worse that that.

With Rumple in a coma alongside everything else, there were days where she struggled to get out of bed. She considered those to be her ‘good’ days now. Whereas before she had dreamed of grand adventures and getting to be the hero, now it was a victory to have enough strength to get out of bed, get dressed, walk down to her husband’s shop, and get through her work day without weeping. Strength and bravery weren’t just about helping people or being good, but putting one foot in front of the other when you all of you really wanted to do was cry. It was strength to make it down to the hospital, hold his hand, read him a story, and tell him about the current plans to wake him without breaking down.

There were many days where she would break down at his bedside.

Not that there were many current plans to wake him. Emma being the Dark One was everyone’s first and only priority. As per usual none of the heroes cared about her own personal tragedy as it didn’t affect them. The fact that she remembered having a child didn’t seem even make a blip on their radar. They had thrown parties. Laughed about Snow killing a dwarf.

On her ‘bad’ days, she laid in bed and just started at the ceiling. Wondering what she could have done differently. Knowing that even if she found that one moment that it wouldn’t matter, you couldn’t change the past. On bad days she forgot to eat and had trouble sleeping. On bad days she sobbed until she was so tired of crying she just wanted to do something else, anything else. But she couldn’t get out of bed. Not one of her friends checked in on her.

She had more bad days than good days.

When Rumple had died the first time, Belle had fallen apart emotionally. After several weeks of mourning, she had mustered up enough willpower to leave the house. The bad days were exhausting, and she told herself that it was a disservice to Rumple’s memory. Rumple had wanted her to live. But still, the strong bands that she felt around her chest would tighten when she had tried to move forward. Archie had been there for her. She needed help that none of her so called friends were able to provide. Casseroles the first week were all well and good, but no one wanted to talk with her about anything remotely related to what had happened. As if she would break at the mere mention of his name. It made them uncomfortable, and it was better for them to not feel that way than try and support her through her grief.

Talking about it made her sad, but not uncomfortable. Pretending that it hadn’t happened was worse. Just like now.

Once Rumple came back, she had stopped her sessions abruptly. She had to focus on the task of rescuing him from Zelena, that she didn’t think talking about losing him was needed any longer. The reason for her sadness was gone. He was back. He was alive. And he needed her to save him. That was the big thing she had to work through at the moment.

Then they were getting married. Archie had tried to talk to her several times about coming in for a session after Rumple had proposed. “You’ve been through a roller coaster of emotions in the past year. Death, rebirth, madness, saving him from Zelena. If you need someone to help you process that I’m here.” She knew from Rumple’s grumbling that he had made the same offer to him prior to the wedding. But they hadn’t thought it wasn’t needed. Their love had overcome everything, why pick through the bones of what had come before? It was time to look to the future. And even though he may have had some reservations, Archie had performed their ceremony. After they had kissed, he had hugged both of them wishing them luck.

How naive that was now. There were no happy endings. The story never ended. When one difficult chapter closed, a new one began. In the end, the story was about love.

When it had all fallen apart and she had banished him, she had steadfastly refused to start her sessions again. She would see Archie at Granny’s or at the park, and would smile and wave. Yes she found her estranged marriage difficult to bear at times. But she firmly pushed on. If it bothered her that Hook was only her friend until he freed the fairies from the hat, she pushed it to the side. If it annoyed her that the Snow and Charming had told her that Rumple had never done anything good for the town and it was good he was banished, she acknowledged that it bothered her, tried to accepted it and tried to move on. Even when Regina got the credit for all her hard work at freeing the fairies, she opted not to take it personally. She knew what work she had done and didn’t need any reward.

She had bought a charm bracelet that had what she remembered as her son’s birthstone on it. Whenever she missed him, she would rub the charm. The metal had started to wear smooth.

When she had awoken from Isaac's story and remembered everything it hadn’t hit her right away. When she burst into Rumple’s shop, her first thought was to keep him from harming anyone else.

It wasn’t until after everyone had left the two of them alone it the shop that it overwhelmed her. She remembered having a child. And now even worse than being gone, it had turned out he had never really been hers after all.

“My son. Oh my sweet boy. Neal. Nealie.” She had sat on the floor rocking and crying next to Rumple’s still form until once again, Archie had come looking for her.

“Belle.”

“Archie. Rumple and I had a son. Our son. I just want my son.”

Archie hadn’t reminded her at the time that Neal wasn’t actually hers or Rumple’s. He had just knelt down on the floor with her and held her as she rocked whispers quiet shh’s into her ear.

Eventually everyone came back to take Rumple to the hospital. Hook had made several snide remarks until she had burst into tears again, and only then did he have the decency to stop.

She had planted a tree in the backyard behind Rumple’s house. She loved how it was a blooming tree, but as she wiped the sweat off her brow after burying the root ball her first thought was that she would rather have her child back. She loved him more than any tree.

The rest of that day had gone badly.

Weeks had gone by. And everyone around her had tried to go back to normal. Well as normal as you could with a Dark Emma running around. But Belle could only search for her ‘new normal’ as Archie called it.

She had expected their sessions to start with Archie lecturing her about it wasn’t real. How missing something that was never yours was silly. That if she just followed steps she’d be able to move past the grief. But he didn’t start with advice. Just asked her questions and tried to help her focus on the big picture.

“I know it wasn’t real Archie, I know he was never my Neal but Snow and Charming’s Neal. I know the author created those memories of having a child. I can’t help but miss him. The idea of him. I remember being pregnant. I remember him liking honey and berries because he would kick extra hard when I would eat that. I remember Rumple singing to him. I remember giving birth, and now it is all like this dream that I know wasn’t real and yet was so real that it has taken over my life. I wonder what kind of person he would have grown up into. Would he have been smart like his parents? Would he have loved to spin like his father? Would he have...would he have been a good man? And then I feel like I’m betraying the Charmings as Neal is their son. He’s always been their son. And then I see them out with Neal and I feel sad.”

She had turned down every babysitting request the Charmings had made. She wasn’t going to do anything to their child, it just hurt her to much.

“Do you feel like you want to take Neal?”

“Oh no. No. That version of Neal has never been mine. I don’t know anything about him really. It’s more...the reminder of what had been lost that hurts. Which is silly because I never lost anything.”

And Archie being Archie always had the right answers. He had accepted her right to feel those emotions. “Even though he wasn’t yours, you loved. You love. Even if it’s only the work of an author, you experienced those things in your heart. And now you’ve lost that. Grieving that loss is natural. If you didn’t mourn you would be betraying yourself. Part of this process is accepting that it is okay to feel this way.” When he saw her face he shook his head, “No really. It is okay to feel this way. I wouldn’t go around mentioning it to the Charmings or Hook or Regina or Henry-but you’ve experienced the love and the loss of a child. Even if it was only a fantasy. You’re not being pathological, what you’re feeling is totally normal. It’s normal to mourn like this. ”

There was the fact that Rumple might never wake up, or just as bad wake up and also remember he had lost another child. She had gone to speak to Isaac in the cell where they had locked him up next to Zelena and he had laughed in her face. Rumple had only asked for her to be happy and off on adventures, but Isaac had changed her story. “I knew you loved each other, even if he thought you didn’t. You and a family were the perfect bit of leverage in case something went wrong.” She had never hit anyone in her life before, but as her hand met his face in a resounding crack she felt better than she had in weeks.

Time passed and she still struggled. She had told Archie that she was exhausted. That as days went into weeks she was tired of feeling this way. How could she miss something that never was?

“Grieving is hard work. It’s exhausting. But it is important work that honors the memory of the person you lost and honors the love that you had and still have for that person.”

She had been out at a picnic and Lily had asked her if she had ever had children.  
Feeling like she was betraying her son’s memory, she simply said ‘no’. It would have made things awkward.

Once a week she would close the library and the shop early and go speak with Archie. She had gone into therapy expecting to be given a virtual checklist of things to do to move through the grief. Step 1. Deny Step 2. Be Angry. Step 3. Bargain. Being well read and a planner, she was frustrated that she wasn’t able to work through her grief like the books said she was supposed to. She had been amazed when Archie called the 5 stages of grief “absolute bullshit”. Archie had helped her find a emotional toolkit to work from, as opposed to just telling her that there was a end point.

“No one’s grief works like that. If it did, everyone would get over their losses in a few short months and there would be no need for grief counselors and no one would ever be broken. We would all just process through this easy worksheet and come out on the other side accepting and whole. You might be angry one minute, and then sad. You might be accepting and angry at the same time. You might try to bargain and be sad at the same time. You might start at step 5 and then skip to 3. You might actually work your way through the the ‘cycle’ over and over again. That’s not how we are wired to work. We are all people. Not machines. Belle, each person is different and needs to go through the grieving process in their own way. Individually, everyone has to be willing to explore whatever they need to do to honor the love and the memory. You have to grieve as Belle. And no one else can tell you what that means. Not even me. ”

Early on she would stand in the shower and sing the songs that she had sung to her child. One day she had started drying her hair and realized she hadn’t thought about Neal all morning. And it was like losing him all over again.

“Sorrow like this is like having a magical pebble in your pocket. When you first put your hand in, you are always going to notice it. Always run it through your fingers. At first it’s going to be like a boulder instead of pebble. And there are going to be days in the future where you forget that pebble is even there. And then all of a sudden you’ll reach in and it will weigh as much as a boulder again. The pebble will never really go away Belle, you’re just going to find new ways to carry it. Moving forward is not letting go.”

And yet against her will time kept moving. Rumple still hadn’t woken up. Other than Archie no one cared how she was other than to ask her if Rumple had woken up. Emma was wreaking havoc as the Dark One. The day before they left on a rescue mission Snow had come to visit and finally admitted. “We understand what Rumpelstiltskin went through so much clearer now. We had thought it would be different with Emma because she was the savior. But the Dark One consumes everything it touches. Hopefully he’ll wake up Belle and we can tell him that.” And with a squeeze on Belle’s shoulder, Snow, David, Regina, Hook, and Henry were all off to Camelot.

There were nights where she would sit out in their backyard as the crisp autumn air flowed over her. She would look at the charm on her wrist, think about the tattoo of his name on her hip and say out loud into the ether:

“Mommy misses you. Mommy loves you. Mommy wishes she could hear you say ‘I love you Mommy’ just one time. ”

And then she would weep for what had never been and never could be.


End file.
